Some ice cream
The HBO TV series Looking has been cancelled. If you never saw it, it was about three gay men in San Francisco and their friendships, families, work and love lives. It was never likely to be a world-conquering hit but even among LGBT audiences, it had many detractors – for being too heteronormative, for being too white, for being too boring.
As Adam Baran has observed, its axing after two seasons totalling 18 episodes was met in some parts of the queer social-mediasphere with something like relish – a sense of ‘good riddance to…’ Well, to what, exactly?
It put me in mind of a conversation I’ve had lately with several people on the London scene. The context of course is the blight of venue closures that continues to affect our city on a more or less daily basis. (Today’s casualty: Food for Thought in Covent Garden.)
There are numerous variations but – if we take as an example the Joiners Arms, the Hackney LGBTQ pub that was closed in January and is fighting to reopen – the conversation goes something like this:
ME: Did you hear the council upheld the Joiners Arms’ Asset of Community Value status? Good news, right?
THEM: Yeah, I guess, but I was never much of a fan of the Joiners. Bit messy/hipstery/arsey for me. And, well, bars close, don’t they?
These reactions hint at a wider shift that isn’t restricted to gay culture – a shift that increasingly sees personal taste privileged over community solidarity.
Of course, it would be possible to make a principled argument about why Looking or the Joiners are, on balance, bad things for LGBTQ people and society in general. But that doesn’t happen very often. Usually the vibe seems to be “I didn’t enjoy that particular thing so I don’t care that it’s gone”.
This is an essentially consumerist attitude. It sees things like TV shows and bars as products whose sole job is to gratify you personally.
The genius of consumerism is its ability to cultivate both narcissism and impotence, to flatter and infantilise at the same time. It tells you that nothing is more important than your access to your preferred option from a range of given choices. It refuses the idea that other choices might exist beyond that range – and the idea that you have the power to create those choices yourself, to stand up and make those alternatives a reality.
Consumerism coddles to subdue.
So the news that Looking is being axed becomes something to shrug off because it wasn’t your preferred choice when it comes to spending half an hour watching TV – rather than a cause for concern because it was one of a tiny number of mainstream TV shows that sincerely attempt to engage with and express contemporary LGBTQ experience through the work of an openly LGBTQ cast and crew.
And the closure of the Joiners is something to shrug off because you preferred to have a pint at the George & Dragon or don’t actually go to bars, thanks – rather than a cause for concern because what was a space for queer socialising and community-building has (at least for now) disappeared to make way for the kind of profit-oriented urban redevelopment that makes it harder and harder for new queer spaces to open.
The problem is passivity: the assumption that, if we stand by while this imperfect offering falls by the wayside, a better option will automatically be served up in due course. And underlying that is the assumption that there’s nothing we can do about it anyway. But neither of those assumptions is true.
There’s no guarantee that a major channel like HBO will take such an ambitious punt on LGBTQ programming in the near future. And, under current circumstances, there’s no chance of new queer venues in London opening in numbers equivalent to those closing.
Those venues will continue to close because personal taste – consumer choice – only counts for so much. It’s only a means to an end and the end is profit. If there’s more money to be made another way, the existing range of available options will be changed or removed altogether.
So if it turns out – as it has – that any central London property will be more profitable as commercial retail and residential units than as an independent bar, that’s what most of them will become.
And your personal preference will count for nothing. And that ideal version of Looking or the Joiners that you’re waiting for might never arrive. And in five or ten years’ time, you might regret that now no one can even try to create queer social spaces in central London or mainstream TV shows by and about LGBTQ people.
But there is something we can do about it. We can give a shit about things that try to do something bold or progressive – things that are examples of categories we care about, even if the results aren’t to our personal taste. You don’t have to go all-out to defend them – by all means critique them – but for God’s sake don’t just take a hatchet to them or act like their demise doesn’t matter.
Projects that dissent from the corporate-conservative norm, however imperfectly, are vital to maintaining the possibility of free expression and progressive change. Create your own! And, if that’s not going to happen, then show some solidarity to those who are, whether the results are to your personal taste or not.
It’s not about whether you like pistachio. It’s about whether you want to live in a world without ice cream.
